The Church’s Response
In trying to understand how the church can communicate in a relevant way with postmodern thinkers, Leonard Sweet evaluates the amazing success of the TV show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. “…The success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is that, unlike other game shows, it has successfully transitioned from rational to experiential, from representative to participatory, from word based to image driven, and from individual to connecting the individual and the communal” (xxi). The church must learn to communicate the truth not just rationally, but experientially. The church must call postmodernists to participate with the truth beyond linguistic understanding into the realm of the imagination. Finally, the church must communicate the truth of the body of Christ, the worship community.
The Rational, Experiential Truth
Christian truth has never been a concept or idea, but a person. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” said Jesus (John 14:6). Postmodernists will never accept the gospel as a conceptual, authoritative truth. Their minds have been enslaved by the thought, by the belief, that there is no such thing. Christians will have as much success along this track as postmoderns would if they were trying to convince us that life on earth originated from space aliens. The concept of space aliens creating life on earth is as contrary to the Christian worldview as the idea of ultimate truth is to the postmoderns. “It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe that truth is relative. It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive” (Veith 16).
Yet postmoderns believe wholeheartedly in little, personal truths. In fact, they cannot disbelieve in personal stories of truth without undermining their own belief systems. There is no greater collection of personal encounters with truth than the Bible. It is filled with individuals coming to the realization of truth in their own lives. The woman at the well discovered a man who told her everything she ever did. “Could this be the Christ?” she asked (John 4:29). Thomas bowed before the resurrected Christ and proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Saul bowed on the road to Damascus before the blinding light and asked, “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5).
As we introduce postmoderns to the historical Jesus, the Jesus of the gospels, Jesus the storyteller, we introduce them to the truth. As we earnestly pray for our postmodern friends, the Holy Spirit of truth will begin moving in and around them. And as they experience the truth for themselves, not only vicariously through the stories of Jesus, but personally through their own lives, they will eventually arrive at the point where their truth encounters with Jesus will far outnumber all of their other “truth encounters” with other beliefs, and they will then be open to the idea of ultimate truth. Todd Hahn and David Verhaagen call this “narrative evangelism” (26)
The Church as a Body
Not only do postmodernists need to encounter the person of Jesus Christ in the scripture, but they also need to encounter him within his body, the church. Perhaps more than any other need in their lives, the gospel can speak to the loneliness and isolation that so may Busters and Bridgers feel. At a time when families and communities and whole societies seem to be falling apart, or worse tearing each other apart, the church, the body of Christ, can model a wholesome, diverse, supportive family. “The Church was a different kind of community, neither unified in an autonomous humanism like the Tower-builders [of Babel] and the modernists, nor fractured into alien groups like the Babelites and the postmodernists. Rather the Church is a balance of both unity and diversity, a single Body consisting of organs as different from each other as a foot and an eye, but unified in love for each other and faith in Jesus Christ” (Veith 22).
For many congregations, productive ministry will require many changes. Our churches will have to be more representative of families than organizations. Service, communication, fellowship, meeting needs, giving, all these aspects of corporate life together will have to become more of the norm. We will have to move out of our modernist comfort zones in order to corporately reach postmoderns. The good news is that we need to do this anyway, for our own sakes. We need to more fully be an Acts 2:42-47 church. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”
The Truth as a Worldview
Finally, we need to get the truth of the gospel out into the marketplace where postmoderns can see it. Postmodernists believe what they believe because they saw the problems unsolved by modern solutions. As we have seen, postmodern answers don’t effectively address them either. The gospel, however, does. The answer to poverty is not socialism, but work and generosity. The answer to conflict is not destruction of beliefs, but respectful communication and seeking after the truth. The solution of deteriorating families is not abandonment, but sacrificial servanthood. As we are able to present Biblical ideas and models as solutions to real problems, as we are able to creatively, visually, and imaginatively place God’s plan alongside the failed plans of postmodernism, we will eventually get a hearing, and the Christian metanarrative will be embraced as the truth.
Francis Schaeffer named this process “worldview criticism.” He seeks to look within worldviews, both Christian and non-Christian, to look at the underlying assumptions about truth, and then to examine how these underlying assumptions will play out in everyday life. Invariably the contradictions inherent within postmodernism (or any other non-Christian worldview) will surface. This requires Christians, however, to have enough faith to leave their propositionally defined worldviews, step into a non-Christian worldview (for a season), and come to understand it well enough to speak form within it. In the same way that Christ had to leave Heaven and submit himself to the limits of manhood, we must be willing to step out of our understandings of truth and submit ourselves to the limits of postmodern ideas. Then postmodernists will be able to know us, understand us, believe us, and respond to the Truth that lives within us.
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